


A Person is a Material Thing

by followbutterfly



Category: X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Erik Has Feelings, Gap Filler, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Smut, Telepathic Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-27
Updated: 2016-11-27
Packaged: 2018-09-02 12:36:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8667892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/followbutterfly/pseuds/followbutterfly
Summary: It took Erik like, a month -- no, two months, to start feeling for a person. Seconds later after he realized how he felt, Charles knew.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FuryRed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FuryRed/gifts).



 

“A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.”   
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

 

 

Erik jumped through the water, burying himself deep in the cold water in November. He was focused on the submarine so he couldn’t feel his body being heavier and numb. The coldness was piercing into it like a thousand of knives, or Emma’s telepathy mercilessly jabbing through his mind, digging deep in his memories – pain, fear and rage rage and rage. Finding Shaw and kill him was only thing drove Erik to the end of the world.

  
Something oddly warm suddenly engulfed his brain, making those memories shuttered and dissolved into a distant, subtly pain. But Erik couldn’t gasp what happened to him, only the dark water started to crush him with the brutal coldness that made Erik wanted to scream and get out of all this.

  
He hated when a hand – an arm gasp and tried to yanked him from under the water with a strong fierceness and determination, whose heart was bleeding by touching his childhood memories boiling into Erik’s head.

  
_Let go, Erik. You have to let go._

  
Erik struggled to fight back, pushing back the other and screamed until his lungs rushed of water, and he needed more air to breathe –

  
_Let go, or you will be drown. The other said, please, Erik._

  
The more effort he put to get away from the voice, the less chances he lost to catch Shaw.  
But he couldn’t carry out this revenge by neglecting the voice ringing in his head. Its warmness that made him feel numbness in the cold, dark water. He started to feel the all of the tangible senses of the world again, and Erik hated this.

 

So, he let go, just for that man leaving him alone in the pleasant coldness again.

 

 

A week later

 

Erik learned to memorize Charles’s trivial manners: the way he cocked his shin while speaking about mutations, the way he looked up to his watch and announced everyone should have a tea break for all things, the way Charles yawned during CIA meetings but tried to hide it by shyly rubbing his hair, the way Charles looked through the paperwork and made a groan because he couldn’t help thinking that those human’s attempt to understand mutants was so far beyond backward, but all he did was smile and admiring Moira’s overly dressed suit.

  
“Why don’t you tell them they’re all wrong about us?”

  
Charles spluttered the tea he was drinking , “I’m sorry,” his shirt was soaked. He put down his tea cup and looked at Erik. “What was that for?”

  
“Just saying you shouldn’t ignore how stupid humans are. They don’t understand about mutants and all we’re trying to do.”  
Charles sighed, he changed his position on the chair, not looking to Erik’s eyes but staring at the CIA files on the desk. Then his voice echoed in Erik’s head.

 

_But at least they tried to subdue their skepticism and begin to believe us. Don’t you feel any accomplishments, my friend. From the start until at the moment we’re planning to capture Sebastian Shaw, accused as the Omega Level Mutant and world’s most dangerous terrorist._

“There’s no need.” Erik snapped. “We don’t need their help to kill Shaw.”

  
As he spoke, everyone in the meeting looked at him, wild eyes and terrified.

  
Charles collected himself, still not looking at Erik but sipping more tea.

  
_It’s you who wants to kill Shaw, not us._ Charles gently reminded him.

  
Erik felt a tremor inside of him growling and shuddering.

  
Charles knew too. He straightened himself up from the seat and quickly changed the façade into a friendly but distant look and talked to CIA fellows.

  
“I think we should talk about dinner, then. Who will treat for this meal?”

  
He quickly changed the look with Erik. The smile disappeared. A concern feeling was sent straight through his mind. _We should talk about this, my friend._

  
_Anytime._ Erik fired back, leaving the room before someone called his name.

 

 

Two weeks later

 

Charles began to mention Erik’s rage as The Monster, but Erik knew that was just a foolish trick, replaced by something he couldn’t identified with, to pull away from what he really is.

  
But he didn’t correct Charles. He let him talk about ‘his monster’ as he wanted to. They made a couple of sandwiches, packed them for the next trip and sometimes had time enough to argue about it.

  
“I don’t see why it wouldn’t disappear in one day.” Charles rest his arms over the passenger seat and looked over the side windows to feel the wind touching his freckled face, blinking the bright blue eyes to adjust with nice breeze.

  
“I was diagnosed with Schizomania as I was a child because I can hear voices contrasting to what they said. Ridiculous, isn’t it? As in a borderline age, when I was alone in the house, I attempted to commit the suicides. I used to shout at mother, exposing her secret lover has been fucking with a maid under her nose. My mother couldn’t stand it and that was the last string. They wanted to set me up in the mental hospital but my father didn’t let that happen. Gladly he died after I was eighteen, so I ran away to New York with Raven and his fortune.”

  
“I wasn’t ashamed about my pretty fucked up institutions.” He trailed off and chuckled. “I’d rather let the story revealed and embraced it, to let anyone be like me.”

  
Erik couldn’t help himself. “What you’ve told me made me wonder why you still have faith in those humans unless you want something to hold onto.”

  
Charles smiled, “or what I’ve been through made me believe that one day we will realize and fight our monsters back and perish them away.”

  
_One true poet_ , Erik thought out loud so that Charles could hear him. And he responded with a laugh in a light-hearted tone.

 

 

Three weeks later

 

 _Fight and perish out monsters away._ What a stupid wishful thinking.

 

Erik gritted his teeth. His sweating hands trying to push gasp the mattress. His throat was dry and aching from screaming. All the metal made furniture has been cracked, shattering and falling onto the ground.

  
He was crying, due to the pain he had been suffering through all his life.

  
Also this pain fueled him to live on. He couldn’t imagine how his life would be, if it vanished, if he started to feel anything except rage and fear that drove him. Charles was wrong. He and his monster were not separated. They were the one, inhabited in this human cage with the special gifted power; that one that was called Erik Lehnsherr.

  
He was that Erik Lehnsherr. He had been Erik Lehnsherr his mother used to know and love. He had been a boy with the human heart. The boy ate, breathe, lived and loved as everybody did, until that day his mother fell on to the ground after the sound of the gun.

  
_Du kannst es schaffen. Ich glaube an dich, mein Sohn_

 

She didn’t finish the last word, but Erik knew she was calling out his name.

 

Those words kept repeating in his head, followed by her scream and the gun shot. He continued to scream, and scream. This was him: a monster.

 

His world was snapped with a white noise. The pain choked up and was gone, leaving him limbless on the bed.

 

A new feeling was tingling inside his head. It was pulsing as the same beating as his heart, glowing and warm. This time, it was more reluctant to approach his mind, as if it was waiting for his permission.

 

Erik stopped breathing. He heard a voice in head.

 

Again, he discerned the sensation in the world around him. After the calamity, he began to feel the weight of his body, the harsh breathing under his breath, the fast beating of the heart and the aching under the skin in everywhere.

 

And when he started to feel the surroundings, he hated it. This world and its impulse made him want to cry.

 

It was so unbearable. Its weight made him feel so much.

 

 _Shh, you’re going to be fine._ The voice was soothing him.

 

His face was smudged with tears and Erik could feel a tint smell of blood inside his mouth, and his body ached and was terribly hurt. His skin was prickling and bleeding.

 

“I hate this,” he sobbed silently, alone in a room, with the voice inside his head. “And I hate you to make me feel it.”

 

 _It will be okay_ , _I promise._ said the voice.

 

 

 

One month later,

 

 

They succeed in recruiting some mutants in the short period of time and went to Russia. Then Shaw and his followers unexpectedly showed up at the CIA base and killed every single human. They died like the meat to satisfied Shaw’s disappointment as his target, the telepath, was away.

 

When they heard the news, instead of talking to Erik inside of the head, Charles reached out to hold his hand. With a heartbeat moment later, Charles told him to calm down.

 

 _But the whole world will know and come after us. They don’t choose whom to keep. There’re only us and them._  Erik didn’t push away Charles’s hand.

 

“What we’re going to do?” Sean, the youngest of all the recruited, looking frightened and red-eyed, but Erik could feel something inside the young man has changed forever after seeing his friend die in front of him.

 

“We must avenge them.” He said before even thinking. Charles reached out, this time with a telepathic voice.

 

_They’re children._

 

_No, they were. The world will aim us, attack and destroy. We have to take that chance to fight back when we still have time._

 

Something inside Erik recalled that stirring ambition. It roared back in a greeting. His stomach was twitching, and he could feel the turmoil at the back of his head. The Monster was calling to him in earnest, and Erik welcomed it gladly.

 

“Could you -- ” Charles was upset, of course. “Can I speak to you for a minute, Erik?”

 

They went back to the car. Erik locked the door with his power and it created the loud thud before crumbled by Charles’s angry voice.

 

“This is the most inappropriate time to convince those young people to be a murderer. I couldn’t believe how you choose to tell them, without even caring how they feel right now, after Darwin’s death! For God’s sake, Erik!”

 

But Erik knew he would win this time. “This is the right time, otherwise everyone, even you will regret to hold back the power and fight back. You see what’s in Emma’s head. The Russians and Americans will unite, and the nuke will be aiming at us being scattered in the ghetto like the rats. You see their power and you know there’s no way to stop.”

 

Charles couldn’t win this. Erik knew because the body language he expressed, through pushing away hair on the forehead, the blue eyes not looking right back at Erik. The man was losing control.

 

“But I can’t let them be like—” and he paused, realize what he would say next.

 

Checkmate. Erik smiled.

 

“Being like what? Me? A killing machine made from blood and bone by the hatred for the mankind?”

 

Charles didn’t answer. He kept looking the other way.

 

“Stop thinking like a human, Charles. You disgust me.” He finally said this.

 

Suddenly Erik felt the strong force smacking on his face as Charles punched him. His head was smashed with the lock from the passenger seat. Before he could think of what happened, his lips were smacked harshly by Charles’s.

 

It was hardly called a kiss. They were both in the very uncomfortable position in the middle of heated argument. Erik’s body lifted slightly from the sitting position and Charles, who was shorter, reached out to pull Erik to the driver seat. It was awkward, so cringe with no romantic feelings involved. It was like an old couple fighting, and one tried to reconcile in the wrong way that was difficult to judge.

 

Yet, it was their first kiss –Erik’s first kiss.

 

Charles pulled back. He looked at Erik who still didn’t know how to respond properly with the teary eyes.

 

“I couldn’t believe it. After all this time –” Charles didn’t finish what he was trying to say. He took a deep breath one more time and get out of the car.

 

 

 

One month and a half

 

 

Everything between them was like the same. They talked and discussed about the plan. Charles taught Erik to control his power, and Erik challenged him to pull the trigger through his head, while he was trying to stop the bullet. Everything felt much like the same.

 

Except that Charles never got inside his head again, and it worried him.

 

The schedule for today was Charles and Erik in the morning. Erik put off the exercise as they always did in before the training started and went to the back of the house where there was a huge satellite. Charles was waiting for him, smiling.

 

“I hope you get a good sleep. Today’s lesson was pretty tough.” His voice sounded flirtatious but strange, like his talking to a girl before luring her to bed, but Erik didn’t fall for the trap.

 

“I can handle it.”

 

Charles took a deep breath, before said, “I’ve been thinking – about us.”

 

Erik’s whole body was frozen. “What do you mean?”

 

“Look, Erik. I saw there’s no need to deny anything. I saw your thoughts –and I knew how you feel.”

 

Erik stumbled. The process in his thoughts was cut off, switched off and black out. His heart was rushing fast, too fast. He couldn’t recognize his own voice, while saying, “what are you talking about?”

 

“I know how you feel about me.” Charles’s voice was gentle. “And I feel as same as you. Erik, I’m --”

 

That was the moment Erik started to run away.

 

The weeks after that he tried to avoid Charles. He ate meals in his own room, work out his physical strength in the gym and suddenly leave when he felt the clicking of the metal from Charles’s watch coming near him. Sometimes the others sensed something wrong with him. Raven looked at him suspiciously, but didn’t say anything. Erik wondered how much she already knew about this.

 

One more thing, that made Erik panicked was that this time, he was fighting with the feelings alone, and couldn’t find The Monster to cling onto.

 

This is the weirdest, yet the most conspicuous thing Erik couldn’t cope with. He kept pacing in the room, watching the news without anything left in the head, mostly some white noise and background chattering. His work on metal control was the worst; the metal object kept falling onto the ground, without his consciousness, and he kept letting them fell over and over again and he kept wondering whether one day he might lose even his power.

 

“Because this time your power didn’t come from The Monster but inside of you.”

 

Erik was startled and jumped out from the chair. A picture frame on the wall crashed on the floor and smashed into pieces. Charles’s lean body was lingering at the doorframe, the blue eyes staring at him with no emotions.

 

“Long time no see, my friend,” His face was unusually rigid and unpredictable.

 

“I don’t want to talk to you.”

 

Charles scoffed, “don’t be a coward, Erik.” He swiftly walked to stand in front of Erik. “You channeled all the expressions after the last time we met all over the mansion. Besides me, everyone almost sensed that you’re up to something.”

 

Erik wanted to throw something at Charles’s face as the distractions and left the room.

 

But Charles knew him too well.

 

“The easiest way to access the greatest power, as you want, is that --” while talking to him, Charles reached his arms to hold on Erik’s face, string back through his grey blue eyes, “you have to kiss me.”

 

Erik felt like his world was collided -- his old world, when he was lowering his head, as slowly as he could, to meet Charles’s mouth and reluctantly kiss him.

 

It happened for some minutes when their lips met but for him it longed for a million year. Erik could feel Charles smile, and softly laughed, pulling away a little.

 

“Oh you bastard,” he swore under his breath and pull Erik into his embrace and kissed him again.

 

Erik heard the white nose of the TV, the tingling sound of the metal crafted object falling onto the ground and the soft whimper from Charles started licking his tongue.

 

 

 

Two months later

 

 

_But how do you know?_

 

Charles groaned, pausing to pull off the shirt in the midst way. _Really? Erik, now?_

 

_Look, I swear I didn’t fall for you at the first time. You’re like a naïve spoiled kid who wants to get the world’s most attention._

 

 _I don’t want to fight about this, all I need was your cock up into my ass. Charles finally worked on Erik’s bottom._ He ripped off Erik's trousers and threw it across the room.

 

After looking at Erik’s dazzle eyes, he sighed. _Fine. It’s how you was inviting me in your head. You did that all along. You let me in._

 

Erik was confused. He shifted the position into seating, with Charles was on him, pulling out his cock. _You didn’t –_

 

 _I know everything about you._ Charles started to lose his temper. He was pumping Erik’s cock that became hard after one or two more strokes. _I know how greedy you are when you look at me, the way you’re so intense when I touched you. Your eyes couldn’t lay on anything longer than me. Of course I know it, Erik. You have a crush on me since we’ve met._

 

 _That’s not true. How could you know since I was –_ Erik gasped when Charles’s mouth swallowed his cock in a full length to shut him up.

 

_Charles –_

 

 _You have no right to speak._  Charles replied and started to suck his cock with an obscene sound. Erik’s mind was blank. He wasn’t sure he could black out after a blowjob.

 

Charles didn’t let him come but changed the position to sit on Erik’s stomach. Erik yelped when Charles, who seemed to have more experience in this, already prepped himself and slowly, with determination, put Erik’s cock inside of his with a soft moan.

 

Charles would be hurt, because he made a face to adjusted himself for the size of his cock before riding on him. Erik assisted him by balancing the other position to the right place, before Charles, with an effort, started to stroke Erik’s cock by and lifting his waist in and out, fully taking up his by its length.

 

The only sound in the room was the wobbling and squashing sound when their flesh slapping each other in the same rhythm. When the time came, their breathing hitched, Charles lowered the pacing. He called out Erik and without a warning, he slammed the whole body against Erik and they both came in the same breath, shutting the whole world into the black abyss.

 

Someone called Erik. He opened his eyes and saw Charles, looking at him with the clearest blue eyes he had ever seen.

 

 _The answer for your question_ , the voice was softened like a whisper, _is that I hadn’t seen someone so passionate and vulnerable at the same time. Also your mind is like the way you look at me right now. It was the most beautiful and clearest mind I’ve ever seen._

 

_You let yourself to be controlled by your hatred for so long._

 

Erik acknowledged the same warmness he seemed to get familiar with since the first time he was under the water, surrounded by the world of unfamiliarity, rage and fear.

 

_It’s time for you to be free from the Monster. It’s time to see the world._

 

Charles’s lips curled into a bright smile. He gently rubbed Erik’s hair and kissed him on the forehead before sleeping in his arms.

 

Now the world, to Erik, is very beautiful.

 

 


End file.
